Bio: Kevin Ray is a contemporary painter working and living in Covington, Kentucky. He was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Washington University in St. Louis.
Artist Statement:
In my paintings, I try to work and rework the traditions and forms of abstraction. Abstraction is a broad practice within art history - one that foregrounds the materials of art, paint and other mark-making media and the surfaces to which they are applied - in order to create an effect. They are, as a critic of J.M.W. Turner complained in the 1840, “pictures of nothing.” Except that the “nothing” turns out to be a response that the painting engenders in the viewer. What I like most, as a viewer of abstract paintings, is the sensation of being left, if only for a moment, without words.
Of course, looking at an abstract painting, one can still consider things like brushwork and craftsmanship. Or one can regard it as a kind of Rorschach blot in which the viewer identifies images, like shapes identified in clouds or constellations in the relationships of stars.
Sometimes, staring at a painting, I can almost feel my verbal sense of the world being suspended, and I am asked for a time to just look.